ORDERLY DRAFTSMEN, CHAOTIC CARICATURISTS

 Let's see if I can get in one last barnstorming essay for the last day of 2025, building on what I wrote in this essay:

when it comes to strip-artists whose "insanity" allowed them to spawn innumerable grotesques, Capp and Gould are probably roughly equal-- which is a subject worth pursuing in a separate essay.

I'm going to relate twin concepts of "artistic insanity" and "artistic sanity" to a couple of other paired concepts, both alluded to in the title. One of those pairs, "draftsmen and caricaturists," I may have made up out of whole cloth. However, in general "draftsmen" are praised because of their fidelity to visual imagery as normally experienced, and thus they're dominantly associated with representational art. In contrast, it's a given that "caricaturists" deliberately distort commonplace visual reality for the sake of expression, so they can be dominantly associated with non-representational art. I place both Chester Gould and Al Capp in the caricaturist camp, in large part because of their comparable facility with bizarre looking characters.

Now, the second concept-pairing comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, but I'm going to lead off with Camille Paglia's evocative interpretation of Nietzsche:

The Apollonian and the Dionysian, two great western principles, govern sexual personae in life and art. My theory is this: Dionysus is identification, Apollo objectification. Dionysus is the empathic, the sympathetic, emotion transporting us into other people, other palaces, other times. Apollo is the hard, cold separation of western personality and categorical thought. Dionysus is energy, ecstasy, hysteria, promiscuity, emotionalism — heedless indiscriminateness of idea or practice. Apollo is obsessiveness, voyeurism, idolatry, fascism — frigidity and aggression of the eye, petrification of objects. … The quarrel between Apollo and Dionysus is the quarrel between the higher cortex and the older limbic and reptilian brains.

It's also worth noting that in the philosopher's original text, he also aligns the Apollonian with the art of "the dream" and the Dionysian with the art of "intoxication."

To reach a closer understanding of both these tendencies, let us begin by viewing them as the separate art realms of dream and intoxication, two physiological phenomena standing toward one another in much the same relationship as the Apollinian and Dionysian.

Now, both Gould and Capp wrote story-strips, in contrast to the once-and-future dominant form of the gag-strip. But both of them designed their successful features in reaction to the rise of the adventure genre in comic strips of the late 1920s. Hal Foster's TARZAN began in 1929, while in the same year two older gag-strips, Elzie Segar's THIMBLE THEATER and Roy Crane's WASH TUBBS, were successfully reworked to feature tough-guy heroes, respectively Popeye and Captain Easy. While Segar was fundamentally a caricaturist, Crane and Foster were representational draftsmen, and Foster became one of the three most influential artists upon early comic books: Foster for both TARZAN and for his 1937 PRINCE VALIANT, and both Alex Raymond and Milt Caniff, respectively having breakout successes with FLASH GORDON and TERRY AND THE PIRATES. The latter two debuted in 1934, the same year as LI'L ABNER. By contrast, TRACY, debuting in 1931, predated the influence of Raymond and Caniff. However, many testimonies of artists from the time-- for instance, Joe Kubert in ALTER EGO #119 -- indicate that in the late 1930s, Foster, Raymond and Caniff were like master classes in draftmanship to such developing comics-artists as Sheldon Moldoff and the aforementioned Kubert.

What the great draftsmen had in common, despite all their different types of content, was what Nietzsche called "the art of the dream." One should probably specify that Apollonian art-talents guide their fantasies in what might be best termed "waking dreams," dreams guided to a semblance of representational reality. This aesthetic permeates Caniff's 20th-century Oriental adventure, Raymond's space opera, and both the jungle-adventure and Arthurian exploits of Foster.

Now, from the first of Capp's LI'L ABNER strips, comic caricature ruled all of the major characters: the Yokums, the aforeseen General Bullmoose, the jinx Joe Btfsplk, Lena the Hyena, Evil Eye Fleagle, and of course Capp's DICK TRACY spoof Fearless Fosdick. Even the one category of characters who are supposed to be physically desirable-- the many hot girls of ABNER-- tend to be pneumatically stupendous, even Amazonian, in nature.

Now, the earliest TRACY strips, while not as accomplished as the Big Three in terms of actual draftmanship, might be perceived as being fairly representational in nature. However, by the late thirties Gould was investing more energy in developing his rogue's gallery of freakish fiends, as well as upping the *intoxicating* effects of ultraviolence and emphasizing stark use of black and white in the non-Sunday strips. (For that matter the Sunday color strips favored simple, primary colors rather than a graduated color-palette.) Gould didn't share Capp's enthusiasm for busty women-- most of his good-looking women, like Tess Truehart above, are ordinary types-- but he does seem to use a fair number of female grotesques, just like Capp.  

Assuming I've made my case that Gould and Capp were dominantly caricaturists, does it follow that they were "Dionysians" as well? Not necessarily. But in practice, I believe that even though Gould was doing adventure (with barely any humor) while Capp was doing comedy, and usually spoofing adventure-tropes (like death-traps), both of them tapped into The Wellspring of what Paglia calls "energy, ecstasy, hysteria, promiscuity, emotionalism — heedless indiscriminateness of idea or practice." Capp may seem to be mocking "emotionalism" while Gould is fully invested in his melodramatic tropes. But Capp was never a deep intellectual, or even a pseudo-intellectual. He clearly loved designing grotesques just as much as Gould did and found a way to exploit that penchant through comedy.

I have not read as many works by Foster, Raymond, and Caniff as I have of those by Gould and Capp. Still, from what I have read, I see hardly any grotesques in the Big Three Draftsmen. All three build up the glamorousness of the regular female characters-- with Caniff's "Dragon Lady" becoming a trope for "dangerous female" all by herself. But the glamour-girls of the Big Three were somewhere between Gould's mildly pretty women and Capp's anticipations of the Russ Meyer aesthetic. The draftsmen generally align with Paglia's description of Apollonian creativity harnessed for the delectations of the conscious dream: "Apollo is the hard, cold separation of western personality and categorical thought." 

Comic books, aimed at children, were not that invested in the distinctions of western personality, as embodied by chivalric knights or spacefaring crusaders. Many of the superhero artists of the early Golden Age emulated the draftmanship approach of the Big Three, though they frequently injected grotesques that were more typical of the caricaturists. In fact, the BATMAN strip began developing its cast of freak-villains a little before Chester Gould had fully committed to giving Dick Tracy more and more bizarre antagonists. 

I'm tempted to theorize that the Dionysian art-method allows creators to tap deeper creative energies than does the Apollonian method, while the reverse is true with respect to organizing material into coherent narratives. And that's a good place to leave this line of thought until next year.
                                   

  

 

 

 

 

NEAR MYTHS: [LI'L ADAM"], THE SPIRIT (1947)

 This seven-page SPIRIT strip, dubbed "Li'l Adam" in reprints, was one of many clever parodies Will Eisner produced in the postwar period. "Adam" is arguably somewhat mythic in terms of one narrative commenting upon the underlying propositions of other strips. 

Following an establishing page, the hero, preparing to leave on a fishing trip, is forced to return to the crimefighting grind when Al Slapp, creator of the popular "Li'l Adam" hillbilly-humor strip, is severely injured by an unknown assailant. The manager of Slapp's syndicate helpfully implicates two other comic-strip rivals of Slapp: Elmer Hay (Harold Gray) and Hector Ghoul (Chester Gould). The manager also mentions a "Maggie Malone," but as I'll discuss later, there was good reason that both Eisner and the Spirit did not pursue that particular quarry.

   Page 3 establishes one of Eisner's main conceits: all of the suspect-artists both look like, and hang out with, characters from the strips being parodied. Thus Elmer Hay, creator of the "Little Homeless Brenda" strip looks like Daddy Warbucks of "Little Orphan Annie," and has in his company doppelgangers for Annie's dog Sandy and Warbucks' Hindu aide Punjab. (Annie/Brenda is represented by a drawing on the wall.) After dispatching the minor threat of Punjab, the Spirit learns from Hay that he had no reason to attack Slapp, because "Adam" has so outpaced "Brenda" that the older strip only excites interest in the public whenever Slapp skewers the orphan-girl.   

The Spirit then seeks out the low-rent apartment of Harold Ghoul, who looks just like Dick Tracy, while in a flashback Slapp is seen to look roughly like Li'l Abner. Ghoul spins an even sadder tale of woe, telling the hero how he poured his heart and love into the exploits of hero-cop Nick Stacy-- only to see Slapp's parody, "Fearful Fooznick," reduce the heroic policeman to a publishing non-entity. The distraught artist tries to take his own life and is knocked out by the Spirit-- but by the time Slapp has emerged from his coma at some hospital, the Spirit has doped out that the syndicate manager tried to kill Slapp for reasons also related to economic disadvantage. For an end-joke Slapp gets clocked by a dead ringer for Li'l Abner's pappy, albeit a Pappy who's got bodybuilder-muscles like his "son."

I took these images from this extant but discontinued site. The comments-section contains some interesting speculation, that Eisner probably intended this story to be part of a phony "artist-feud" between him and Capp-- but if so, Capp never reciprocated by spoofing the Spirit. Other respondents mention that Capp also participated in a "phony feud" with Allen Saunders of "Mary Worth," and that Capp also spoofed "Peanuts" in addition to "Dick Tracy." However, the most consequential spoof in the history of "Li'l Abner" was Capp's attempt to spoof the popular novel GONE WITH THE WIND. Margaret Mitchell-- aka Eisner's "Maggie Malone"-- assailed Capp with so much legal firepower that, despite the law's protections of parody, the artist and his syndicate decided to discontinue the WIND parody, with Mammy Yokum explaining to the audience why the story would never be finished. Contrary to Eisner's pronouncement on Maggie Malone, Mitchell in real life had in fact shut down Capp's mockery and forced an independent syndicate to do her bidding. I'm sure in 1947 Eisner knew that Capp's mockery had nothing to do with Mitchell never writing another novel, since GONE WITH THE WIND was such a hit that not only was Mitchell made wealthy, she was unlikely to ever write anything that would not be overshadowed by that one big novel. But I doubt Mitchell ever read Eisner's toss-off joke-- and as one of the blog-respondents noted, Harold Gray probably took no notice of the fake feud.

     Perhaps less well known than the Eisner strip, however, was this "Hey Look" strip by Harvey Kurtzman, appearing one year after Eisner's strip. According to my recollection of a Kurtzman interview in COMICS JOURNAL, the artist, in addition to drawing assorted junky humor strips for Timely, got permission from Stan Lee-- who admired Kurtzman's turn of mind-- to do one-page, free-form humor strips under the title "Hey, Look." Usually there was almost no point to these strips from the creator of MAD Magazine (four years in Kurtzman's future). However, using a schtick not unlike MAD's habit of distorting the names of celebrities or characters for parodies, the unnamed speaker of this one-pager sticks the consonants "Shm" in front of every name evoked, beginning with "Shmill Shmeisner." There's not much question that the story Kurtzman is referencing is "Li'l Adam," though I doubt the majority of Timely's kid-readers knew what the monologist was talking about. They might have just barely grasped that "Shmill," whoever he was, had parodied Li'l Abner and Dick Tracy, which was true. Interestingly, Kurtzman does NOT mention "Shmeisner's" parody of Little Orphan Annie, though the figures of that strip would have been just as recognizable. 

Instead, Kurtzman makes it sound as if Chic Young's "Blondie" was somehow part of the mix. I don't think either Eisner or Capp ever parodied "Blondie." However, though I can't verify it from GCD, I have read somewhere that Kurtzman might have done some work for the Timely comic "Rusty," whose star "Rusty Rumple" was a knock-off of "Blondie Bumstead," complete with an idiot husband who was the series' goat. Whether Kurtzman worked on the "Rusty" strip or not, "Hey Look" also appeared in the "Rusty" comic, so Kurtzman had to be aware of the comic's existence. Maybe Kurtzman was implicating himself in the whole "knock-off/parody" concept-- though in 1948 he could hardly have guessed how dependent his own career would center upon parody.         

COUPLE MORE QUICKIE REVIEWS

Like this group of quickie reviews I did in May, there's nothing about these items that firmly aligns them, in terms of symbolic discourse, as either near-myths or null-myths, which distinction of course matters only to me.

The Mark Millar/John Romita Jr. KICK ASS is, to my surprise, a decent read, compared to the awfulness of works like WANTED and OLD MAN LOGAN. It had a few decent jokes and it presented its ultraviolence competently, even though the choreography pales next to the collaboration of Romita Jr and that other guy named Miller on DAREDEVIL THE MAN WITHOUT FEAR.

I suspect that even though a lot of Millar's concepts are paper-thin BS like WANTED, he took a little more care when he sought to represent the supposed fantasy of all superhero geeks. The geeks will accept some parody, but how much? Yet how can Millar do parody and still keep using the tropes that make his story work? How can the author put across the notion that amateur superhero Kick Ass, rescued from a burning building by firemen, doesn't just get his mask pulled off by the first fireman to lay hands on him? And will the geeks accept the parody of an ordinary guy who almost gets massacred playing superhero, as long as he's counterpointed by a "real-life" superhero who's a total badass, i.e. Hit-Girl?

Again, I'm not recounting the pretty simple story here. But the biggest laugh I got was the ad slug on the back of the THB for KICK ASS: "the greatest superhero comic of all time." Maybe somewhere in the low nine-hundreds out of a thousand.

Finally, while it's true that there are a lot of superhero stories that are as basic, simple and unadorned as KICK ASS-- which I think Millar truly believes to be representative of the real genre in comics if not in all media-- it's the more complex versions of the genre that have kept me invested for more than fifty years.

I've even less to say about the 2004 TPB JSA: THE LIBERTY FILES. It's another "realistic" Elseworlds effort, and the gimmick by writer Dan Jolley and writer-artist Tony Harris is that back in WWII the various heroes of the Justice Society-- including a non-canonical Batman-- operate primarily as covert government agents in mufti, unveiling their superheroic long underwear only when fighting super-powered Axis agents. Because FILES is two separate stories jammed together, they don't play off one another very well. Harris does pretty but static photorealistic art and Jolley produces wordy Alan Moore naturalistic dialogue, but with less eccentricity. No better or worse than most Elseworlds stories.

AUTHENTICATING ARTIFICE PT. 1

 In 2019 Martin Scorsese said, in part:

Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. The fact that the films themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament. I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself. But I grew up when I did and I developed a sense of movies — of what they were and what they could be — that was as far from the Marvel universe as we on Earth are from Alpha Centauri.

For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.

I've already responded loosely to aspects of Scorsese's essay in this post, and I won't repeat my response here, except to say that the director's main target, "franchise films" within the superhero genre, belong more to the category I've called "artifice" than to "verisimilitude." Works in the category of artifice are by their nature more aligned with generating meaning, when they do so, by examining literary tropes rather than consensual reality.

But one problem with critiquing "escapist works" is that it can be difficult to demonstrate how they develop over time. I recently re-watched Part 2 of the director's PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH MARTIN SCORSESE THROUGH AMERICAN MOVIES (the only part that happened to be free on Youtube). I noticed that in the documentary Scorsese directed a great deal of attention, at least in the subsection "The Director as Illusionist," to the linear development of various forms of directorial technique, ranging from D.W. Griffith to Alfred Hitchcock. Today anyone can read comparable histories of the development of film techniques, or particular film genres, because general film history has been analyzed in great depth by many writers, long before Scorsese's analysis.

There are a few good general histories of comic books, though none that go into a lot of detail about overall diachronic development of genres (say, how superheroes and funny-animals dominated much of early original comic-book content). However, many histories provide a good linear history of superheroes only, which usually breaks down by designated "ages." I supplied my breakdown of the ages in this essay, but there I focused only the "big events" that defined those ages. A more nuanced analysis, devoted to describing how each age responds to the use of artifice-tropes, would go something like this:

THE GOLDEN AGE-- Because nearly all publications are aimed at children, the entire age is defined largely by wild, pulpish artifice and almost no verisimilitude. Even standout comics artists like Eisner, Cole and Barks only invoke verisimilitude conditionally.

THE SILVER AGE-- Possibly in response to the demands of the Comics Code, the long-time editors of Marvel and DC made an effort to explore techniques that lent greater verisimilitude to their still-pretty-wild fantasies. With DC it was greater use of organized motifs of sci-fi or occult fantasy, while Marvel worked on making characters seem two-dimensional. Almost no other companies followed their lead, though.

THE EARLY BRONZE AGE-- Mainstream comics got edgier, and superheroes followed suit. THE NEW X-MEN, for example, often looked as breezy as many 1960s superhero groups, but often Chris Claremont surreptitiously worked in story-elements suggestive of sadomasochism and rape, among others.

THE LATE BRONZE AGE-- What was kept fairly sub rosa in the seventies became big business as mainstream superhero comics embraced the ideal I've called "adult pulp," of which WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS were the exemplars.

THE IRON AGE-- With greater examination, I might end up dividing this era into "early" and "late" as well, since the "adult pulp" tropes from the eighties and nineties are first compromised by a chimera one might call "the Literary Superhero," and later by "the Politicized Superhero." 

But even if one does not agree with my characterizations, it's possible to see how the superhero genre showed definite changes from era to era. 

But superheroes in cinema-- that's a question for Part 2.

MYTHCOMICS: “PUBLIC ENEMY/LIFEDEATH” (X-MEN #185-186, 1984)

 

Though the X-Men character Storm was not the first Black superheroine, she became, within the subculture of comic book readers, the first one to gain fame both within the medium and in both live-action and animated adaptations. As one of X-MEN’s faithful readers, I wasn’t always happy with the directions long-time writer Chris Claremont took with either Storm or most of the other protagonists. Nevertheless, whatever status any of the seventies X-Men might have as literary myths comes principally from Claremont, even though said heroes had been created by Len Wein and Dave Cockrum.

At least one of Claremont’s virtues as a writer of superhero melodrama might be seen as a vice from the vantage of formulating mythic discourse. In my essay STRIP NO-SHOW I advanced the notion that comic strips, even though they started off with a better reputation for quality work than did the rival medium comic books, labored under restrictions of format presentation that inhibited their mythic potential. Most comic strips remained satisfied with a simple lateral plot-progression, wherein the only “subplots” were usually introductions of future new plotlines. In the sixties comic books revealed a far greater capacity for what I’ve termed “vertical meanings,” some of which arose out of the ability of comic book authors to explore their concepts of character and society more than had their comic strip forebears.

Stan Lee was a pivotal figure in taping this potential, making him the Father of the Soap Opera Comic Book, and even if he didn’t hit one out of the park every time, he and his collaborators comprehended how to give the readers enough satisfaction that they kept coming back for more. Claremont didn’t deliver on satisfying wrap-ups quite as often, but he exceeded Lee in quantity, as an average issue of an eighties X-MEN might be juggling at least four plotlines at a time. True, sometimes the plots were editorially imposed. This fact is evident in the two X-issues I’m examining here, which coordinated one X-plot with developments in the “Rom Spaceknight” continuity. But Claremont also kept his readers coming back for more, and it’s in these stories that he took one of his most daring steps: to divest Storm, one of the group’s most popular members, of the very powers that made her unique.

“Public Enemy” places its focus on two of the group’s X-Women, Storm and Rogue. Unlike Storm, a charter member of the seventies team, Rogue had been introduced as a villain. After bouncing around various features, always being misunderstood like Marvel’s other outlaw-heroes, she switched teams and joined the X-Men roughly a year prior to “Public Enemy.” The cover teases the reader with the idea that Rogue may have returned to villainy, showing the image of Rogue grinning as she clutches the jacket of an apparently defeated Storm. In truth, the perception of Rogue as a public enemy is a false one fostered by two government officials, both hostile to mutantkind: familiar support-cast faces Henry Gyrich and Valerie Cooper. Rogue has been accused of killing a SHIELD agent, and that’s enough reason for Gyrich to lead a task force in order to hunt her down. Because Rogue is especially powerful—having assimilated the powers of the more celebrated heroine Ms. Marvel—Gyrich takes along with a special power-neutralizing ray-gun, invented by government-employed inventor Forge (introduced the previous issue).

By coincidence, Rogue, though unaware of the charges against her, suddenly gets antsy about her association with the X-heroes and flees their company without explanation. Storm, despite having been less than taken with Rogue when the latter joined the team, has conceived a respect for the newbie’s “sense of honor and decency,” and so she tracks down the fugitive heroine, concerned that she may suffer a “relapse.” Rogue, a Mississippi girl, has sought surcease of sorrow at a familiar old haunt: a section of the state’s most famous river, where Rogue first learned of her mutant powers. (One can tell that the issue was written pre-PC: Claremont writes elegaically of the Fall of the South without once mentioning the Evils of Slavery.)

Storm finds Rogue, and they talk, with Rogue expressing her continued concerns, that she could endanger her teammates because her ability to absorb others’ powers could hurt them. Storm proposes an experiment, giving her consent to let Rogue assimilate Storm’s powers and memories. (Later, in “Lifedeath,” Storm mentions how she had to cultivate mental serenity to keep her emotions from affecting the local weather, so in effect Storm seeks to give the tormented Southern belle a taste of the equilibrium she so desires.) After the transfer has been made, Storm passes out, but Rogue does experience an oceanic sense of connectedness to the elements, without any concomitant danger to herself or others. (To be sure, Rogue does suffer the temptation to vampirize Storm for more serene memories, but the better side of her personality wins out.)

However, Gyrich’s team tracks down Rogue and attacks. Rogue’s attempt to wield Storm’s powers forestall the agents but also imperil some bystanders. While Rogue and a recovered Storm seek to help the innocents, Gyrich draws a bead on Rogue with his anti-power gun. Forge, by some contrivance, arrives on the scene to avert Gyrich’s fire, though the ray ends up hitting Storm (possibly because of Forge’s interference, though Claremont doesn’t say so). An explosion stuns Rogue, who gets washed away in the river’s current. Forge recovers the similarly stunned Storm and takes custody of the heroine victimized by the illicit use of Forge’s own technology.

Though “Public Enemy” concentrates most of its narrative on Rogue, arguably Storm plays the more mythic role: that of the elemental goddess who gives all things to her friends/acolytes (even if this is more the province of Earth-deities than sky-gods). Rogue surfaces in a subplot to “Lifedeath,” confronting Valerie Cooper and almost immediately getting entangled with the “Rom Spaceknight” subplot. But most of the issue is devoted to the interactions of Storm and Forge, between a man who could make miracle-weapons and a woman who “once upon a time” could fly.

Storm risked her life to let Rogue temporarily emulate her powers and identity, but it’s quite a different thing to lose the powers that she associated with her identity. At the start of “Lifedeath,” Storm has been languishing in the scientific citadel of Forge for at least a day, since the reader first sees Forge trying to make the disconsolate former superhero take some nourishment. Apparently, Storm is so disassociated that she hasn’t even appealed for help to her friends at Xavier’s school, and they can’t locate her because she no longer has mutant powers.

Nevertheless, though Storm has never met Forge before, and is unaware of his role in removing her powers, she rallies somewhat, needing to talk to someone about her crisis, even as Rogue needed her earlier. “I was one with all creation,” she protests. Forge responds with his version of tough love, replying, “The goddess has become just plain folks.” He later reveals that he understands her impulse toward suicide because the injuries he sustained in Vietnam made him desire self-termination as well. The bond of shared suffering sparks the possibility of romance, though both of them find it difficult to communicate their emotions accurately. Storm does confess how her extreme self-enforcement of serenity constituted a sort of “spiritual celibacy,” which is her reason for having put off her original “regal” appearance in favor of “punk Storm”—though Claremont also implies that there’s another “celibacy” that can’t be fixed via fashion. However, their tentative romance comes to an end when Storm serendipitously finds out who’s responsible for draining her powers. Though in the next issue the two of them will be forced to make common cause against a greater threat, Storm leaves him, telling Forge that he is “hollow, form without substance” and that sooner or later, “I shall fly again.”

Without even looking, I feel reasonably certain that Storm’s de-powering made the list on the nineties site “Women in Refrigerators,” with the implication that the heroine was nullified in the service of repressive patriarchy. Of course, losing her powers did not strike Storm off the list of the X-Men, even though she didn’t regain her abilities for some years. Clearly Claremont’s basic intent here parallels a dozen or so Superman stories in which that hero loses his powers and has to prove his heroism using only his courage and intelligence. But Claremont, drawing upon the spadework of Stan Lee, deepened the sense of trauma associated with a loss of power or prestige. Thus, in these two stories, both heroines—one who fears connection and one who has always felt connected-- are subjected to extended suffering. Claremont used this trauma-trope a lot, and not always to mythopoeic ends. Sometimes, the agonies only served to keep the plot-pots boiling. But in these stories Forge the isolated scientist becomes an overreaching version of Rogue, the isolated heroine. And in reaction against the scientist’s solipsism, Storm’s struggle to regain her own identity takes on mythic stature. And she achieves that stature not because the character is Black, but because she’s a well-written character who happens to be Black.

STAR WARS, NOTHING BUT STAR WARS

For my last ARCHIVE essay of the year, I thought I might put together something a little more accessible to the casual reader (if any) than the previous "Concrescence and the Kinetic Potentiality." And since this year I devoted several essays on my movie-blog to reviewing most of the as-yet-unreviewed-by-me live-action films in the STAR WARS series-- concluding with an analysis of the current RISE OF SKYWALKER-- I'll make the Lucasverse my last ARCHIVE subject for 2019.

In 1978, when Bill Murray sang the lyric in my title for an episode of SNL, he was playing the part of a lounge-singer making up lame lyrics to please an audience of barflies. The main focus of the schtick was to make fun of the way commercial performers tended to latch onto items of popular culture in order to sell themselves. In a different era, Murray might've constructed the same idea around, say, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE.

And yet, though the comedian couldn't have known that the original 1977 film would be anything more than a flash in the pan, he could well have been aware that STAR WARS had garnered an adult audience far beyond anything seen in past SF-successes. I find it unlikely that the same schtick, done in 1968, could've sold the idea that a lounge-singer would've tried to appeal to a bunch of adult drinkers with insider references to any other fantasy-film, even a popular one like PLANET OF THE APES.

There had been a handful of fantasy-works in various media that somewhat escaped the "fantasy is for kids" cultural judgment. DUNE and THE LORD OF THE RINGS attracted an audience outside the world of hardcore SF-readers. The James Bond book-series and its attendant movie-adaptations trafficked in sci-fi gimmickery and villains that resembled the freakish fiends of the DICK TRACY comic strip. The fifties generated a handful of SF-films that enjoyed some qualified support from adult audiences, such as Howard Hawks' THE THING, and the late sixties mirrored that development with the first of the APES films (though later ones became more kiddified) and Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Comic books remained a marginal medium despite adults' brief flirtation with the irony-drenched world of the 1966 BATMAN teleseries. Yet Marvel Comics changed up the game by introducing the formula of "heroes with problems," and while Marvel's penetration of "the real world" was minimal during its strongest creative era, its long-term influence on American culture would make possible the current hegemony of "superhero movies for all ages."

Yet, for all of these influences, the eventual validation of metaphenomenal entertainment for adults all comes down to "nothing but STAR WARS." In my review of the original film, I wrote:

...the religion of the Force works well in the first film because it's become the underdog in the galactic empire. Whenever the materialistic minions of the Empire mention the Jedi, it's only to sneer at the absurdities of their beliefs. To them Darth Vader's continued existence is little more than an indicator of the foolishness of having faith in anything but machines-- and the fact that Vader himself had taken on the semblance of a machine is merely a further confirmation of their world-view.

Luke Skywalker's existence defies the Empire's passion for "technological terrors," and whether or not Lucas meant him to be Vader's son at the time hardly matters. By inheriting Obi-Wan's mantle as the new embodiment of Jedi spirituality, he supplants Vader in the cosmos as Jacob supplanted Esau. This is the unlikely turnabout that Lucas teaches his audience to hunger for, and it plays as much a role in the franchise's success as the aforementioned love of pulpish extravagance. Indeed, without Lucas having crossbred the magic of fairy tales with the machines of SF, the furor over STAR WARS might have petered out over time like many other fannish enthusiasms, no matter how hard big corporations labored to keep them stoked.

George Lucas's scattershot research into fairy tales, archaic shamanism, and mythology clearly touched a cord in the American psyche, not mention the psyches of a great many other world cultures. And its popularity with adults was reflected in one of America's earliest instances of "political correctness," on which I reflected in my essay TRIBAL IN PARADISE:

STAR WARS was the test-case for racial representation. Not long after the film came out, I recall hearing a black comedian say something like, "Tell the truth, white people; you like STAR WARS because it means ya'll gonna leave alla us behind!" There may be more truth than humor in that statement, and Lucasfilms was quick to remedy the lack of POC in the SW universe by introducing Lando Calrissian in the second movie.

This wasn't pure tokenism, though. The Lucasverse as we now know it recapitulated a number of political attitudes, not least Lucas's favored trope of "lots of little good guys can beat a big bad guy." This is best illustrated in the first film in the Rebels' triumph over the Death Star. In addition, an early draft for STAR WARS would've also included a primitive tribe of Wookies beating a contingent of Storm Troopers, even though the story-idea didn't show up on celluloid until Lucas reworked the Wookies into RETURN OF THE JEDI's Ewoks. Reportedly Lucas was not entirely pleased that the only well-known black actor in the cast was "off-camera" in the form of Darth Vader's voice, but the appeal of James Earl Jones' baritone overcame those reservations. Thus I would surmise that Lucas probably didn't engineer the role of Lando Calrissian merely to profit from tokenism. He probably sincerely believed in a judicious forms of racial representation, much like that similarly-liberal toiler-in-fantasy-fields Gene Roddenberry. However, Lucas he didn't virtue-signal quite enough to head off his critics in 1999, when the buffoonish Jar Jar Binks was assailed for being a modern reincarnation of Stepin Fetchit.

The prequel series displeased a lot of viewers for a lot of reasons, but on the whole the series proved a success-- not just in terms of box office, but also in showing how thoroughly the viewing public had become enthralled with the Lucasverse cosmology. That said, even in the sixteen years between RETURN OF THE JEDI and THE PHANTOM MENACE, countless film producers sought to pursue the grail of the "Big Lucas Pay-Off," seeking to subject the once marginal genres of science fiction, magical fantasy and superheroes to the big-budget treatment. Television showed a similar transformation, though obviously Hollywood's Veblen-esque investment in conspicuous consumption didn't play so well on the small screen. Still, serials like XENA, HERCULES and BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER demonstrated methods of bringing in big ratings on a small budget. For all anyone knows, the increasing profitability of sci-fi and superheroes may have played a role in encouraging George Lucas to return to his long-neglected franchise.

There's not much doubt that the "Rise of the Box-Office Profits" motivated Disney to purchase the Lucasverse, but here too, it's hard to say if pure profiteering explained the whole megilla. In my essay FREEDOM VS. FREEDOM PART 4, I called attention to the way Disney strategists re-wrote Lucas's "Clonetroopers" scenario from the prequels in order to start off the new series with an appeal to racial priorities. Thus the first promo for FORCE AWAKENS opens with the sight of a Storm Ttrooper unmasking and revealing the face of a black man (or at least, a face whose ethnicity is less ambiguous than that of actor Temeura Morrison, who played the mercenary from whose cells all Storm Troopers were supposedly derived).

Now, with the Disney trilogy is complete, it's possible to state categorically that the company's vaunted commitment to diversity did not extend to making Finn a halfway interesting character. In my review of FORCE AWAKENS, I pointed out that this revelation could be seen as a war to replay what I called "the African Diaspora," insofar as Disney's white-clad troopers were abducted from their worlds and forced to serve the Empire/First Order. However, even if the persons responsible for crafting the Finn character had some such intention-- and the idea is re-emphasized anew in RISE OF SKYWALKER-- the producers failed utterly at making Finn even as compelling as a Lucas toss-off like Boba Fett. That said, other new characters in the Disneyverse-- Poe, Rose Tiko, Holdo-- were no better characterized, so Finn certainly wasn't singled out for half-assed treatment. The one decent new character, Rey, got most of her mojo from being tied to one of Lucas's legacy characters in a literal sense, and with others in a more symbolic sense.

It may be a measure of Disney's perceptions about the adult audience's investment in the Lucasverse that the company chose to virtue-signal the company's commitment to diversity. However, it should be noted that, even if Lucas and his collaborators might have been influenced by tokenism in crafting Lando Calrissian, they still managed to make Lando an interesting character despite the creators' possibly-monetary motivations.

Even before SKYWALKER appeared in theaters, the first two films in the Disney trilogy were excoriated for their virtue signaling, though this criticism tended to focus less on people-of-color than on a perceived overemphasis of female characters. I feel that this criticism is partly justified in the cases of Holdo and Rose Tiko, who were such ciphers that I find them unlikely vessels of female empowerment. However, I will defend Rey against that charge. I don't think that Lucas's STAR WARS cosmos was ever directed exclusively to the male gender, and I think that Princess Leia stands as a major femme formidable, even if it's true that Carrie Fisher was less than entranced with her role. Rey has been accused by some critics of being a "Mary Sue" in terms of how easily she attains power and formidability. But while I might share some critics' concerns about the depiction of her path to power, I felt all three Disneyverse films succeeded in making her a vital character, one not defined by the gender wars. Thus, when Rey takes the name "Skywalker" at the end of SKYWALKER, I for one embraced that conceit. For me, the gesture demonstrated that, even when the new-verse was compromised by venal virtue-signaling, and dull diversity-concerns, it still was possible for people who weren't George Lucas to create at least one character that escaped such banal politicization.

COMICS HISTORY, STILL SECRET

I suppose I'm late to dinner on this one, given that Robert Kirkman's SECRET HISTORY OF THE COMICS showed up in 2017. I probably heard about the AMC series but just didn't get round to it, but I've now seen all six, roughly hour-long episodes.

The six episodes are replete with a lot of information, sometimes from creators involved in a given era's products, sometimes from their descendants, and sometimes from celebrities who simply want to voice an opinion (Famke Janssen, Michelle Rodriguez). A lot of this information is fairly common knowledge in fan circles, so calling it "secret" is a stretch. To the non-fan community, all this info is not so much "secret" as "obscure," but I surmise that THE OBSCURE HISTORY OF COMICS would prove a non-starter.

I found three of the six-- dealing respectively with Superman, Milestone and Image-- to be efficient but unremarkable, while one dealing with the image of New York City in comics before and after the 9-11 event to be somewhat overblown and a little too uncritical of the Christopher Nolan Bat-films. The other two documentary episodes, though, were much more interesting, albeit for different reasons.

Episode One, "The Mighty Misfits Who Made Marvel," proved fascinating in that it was a thoroughly even-handed treatment of the creative/business relationships of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.  Frankly, a lot of fan-critics could learn how to produce a balanced argument from this episode. Having been a fan/critic for over forty years, I thought I knew pretty much all the publicly available info about those relationships.  

But "Misfits" surprised me, by excerpting actual dialogue from a 1986 radio call-in program, wherein Stan Lee spoke at length with Jack Kirby about both their differences and their undeniable creative harmony. This section alone makes the whole Kirkman documentary-series worth watching.

However, with every bit of good, there's a little bit of bad, and that's what we get with the much more ideologically skewed "Truth About Wonder Woman." There are some decent tidbits of info here, though not much one could not find in the same-year biofilm PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN, which can't be termed a documentary record in any case.

But like many other commentators, many of the so-called "comics historians" in this segment can't resist scoring ideological points. After a quick-and-dirty survey as to how William Moulton Marston got "in" with DC Comics and originated the successful franchise of Wonder Woman, the segment then makes claims that DC was getting a lot of criticism about the bondage elements in the WONDER WOMAN comics, without really saying much about the nature of the criticism itself. Since the majority culture of the 1940s paid nearly no attention to comic books, I would assume that the documentary is talking about irate letters from parents, since even Doctor Wertham wasn't critiquing comics in the very early forties. A little more specificity in this department would've been preferable. 

The outside criticism, according to the documentary, caused publisher Max Gaines to attempt to rein in Marston. This did happen, according to some of DC memos that have survived today. But "Truth" doesn't elucidate how much control Marston had over the franchise, due to the unique contract he had negotiated with the company. Rather, according to the voice-over of narrator Keri Russell (who also voiced Wonder Woman in a direct-to-DVD production), Max Gaines tried to vitiate Marston's control of the character but putting Wonder Woman in the Justice Society. 

The documentary conveniently leaps over the fact that a short 9-page introduction of Wonder Woman, by regular creators Marston and Harry Peter, had appeared separately from the main Justice Society story in ALL-STAR COMICS #8 (late 1941). Interestingly, this short debut, meant to function as a lead-in to the release of the Amazon's regular berth in SENSATION COMICS (January 1942), takes place in the same month as the attack on Pearl Harbor. Clearly, this "advance sample" was taken in the spirit of publicizing Marston's creation.

When Wonder Woman made a literal appearance in a Justice Society story, it took place in ALL-STAR COMICS #11, released the following summer. The adventure shows all of the featured members of the JSA, plus "honorary member" Wonder Woman, engaged in battling Japanese troops in the Pacific Theater. This, according to the documentary, was part of Gaines' insidious plan to wrest control of the Amazon from Marston, because Wonder Woman's segment was scripted by JSA regular Gardner Fox. "Historian" Tim Hanley says:

In one of [Wonder Woman's] early appearances as part of the Justice Society, writer Gardner Fox doesn't quite know what to do with her, so he decides to make her the secretary of the team. All the other male heroes go out to save the day, and she stays behind to keep the notes.

As it happens, Wonder Woman, though she is a "honorary member" due to the convoluted rules of the JSA (which was primarily about promoting characters without their own title), gets just as much action as any male hero in "The Justice Society Joins the War on Japan." Wonder Woman gets to beat up a lot of Nipponese soldiers, and is justly celebrated by American soldiers.

The changeover came next issue, ALL-STAR #12, in which Wonder Woman takes the secretarial role for the first time, with little explanation.

However, given that the use of Wonder Woman in the feature was under the control of the feature's editor, not the writer, Hanley is clearly wrong to blame this development on Fox. There is also no reason to think that Gaines, who did have such control (though he probably would've executed his will through Sheldon Mayer), was trying to seize control. I think it's more likely that Marston objected to having Wonder Woman written by someone else, even though he was already writing the characters in her title feature, as well as in SENSATION COMICS and COMIC CAVALCADE. It's more likely that Gaines, who could not have altered Marston's binding contract, was simply trying to use the Amazon's appeal to help boost the sales of his title.

ALL-STAR COMICS #13, however, took a departure from this "secretary" status, when all of the then-active heroes, including Wonder Woman, were booby-trapped by Nazi spies, who sent all of them soaring into space, where they would presumably be doomed. Instead, all of the heroes had separate adventures on exotic planets, after which they returned to Earth and kicked ass on the fifth columnists.

Roy Thomas's TwoMorrows publication, ALL-STAR COMPANION, examined all of the Justice Society issues in detail, and devoted a sidebar to Wonder Woman's role in issue #13. The sidebar chronicles how regular writer Fox wrote an adventure for Wonder Woman on the planet Venus. Marston wasn't pleased by the script, and wanted the chance to rewrite the story. Gaines apparently okayed the rewrite, thus leading to the only Marston-Peter collaboration to appear in ALL-STAR.

The story, in which the Amazon helps winged female Venusians overcome brutal male invaders, is enjoyable if a bit on the typical side. The existence of this second and last WONDER WOMAN solo JSA-adventure is also not mentioned in "Truth," and so there is no consideration that maybe a harried editor like Max Gaines may have imposed the "secretary solution" simply because he was tired of fighting with Marston over stories. Did this solution appear in issue #12 as an implied warning to Marston, who may have complained too much over the Amazon's depiction in #11? I offer this as speculation only, but if it bears any resemblance to the historical truth-- which is really a genuine "secret" by this time-- then it would seem that Marston ignored the "warning," kept up the complaints, and so had to watch his character relegated to "guest appearances" in the JSA. I would further assume that there was nothing in Marston's contract that prevented such guest appearances, and thus from one standpoint Wonder Woman's secretary status came about simply to "punish" an upstart author, not to reduce her importance as a feminist icon.

Oddly, the documentary's over-ideological interpretation of Max Gaines and Gardner Fox is entirely at odds with its treatment of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as "messy" human beings, who should not be judged in terms of being heroes or villains. Perhaps the somewhat polarizing nature of Marston's WONDER WOMAN mythology invites such over-political readings.

SLOW DANCE IN MYTH CITY

It's hard to believe, but it's been roughly four years since I re-started my myth-analytic project for the second time. As I summarized in RE-ASSESSING THE ARCHIVE, I had dipped my toe into this subject in 2011, with 26 alphabetically arranged stories, showing how the stories contained symbolically complex treatments of myth-tropes. In 2015 I decided to attempt a weekly myth-analysis once more, hypothetically aimed at amassing "1001 myths." The stated purpose of the project was to provide an idea of narrative "plenitude" that would serve to counter the merely political ideals seen at the now-defunct HOODED UTILITARIAN.

As of last week, the count stands at 240 myth-comics from every comic-book era and most of those from comic strips. It seems likely that, if anyone out there were interested in the topic of "myths in comics," that alone would be a sufficient proof of the validity of my critical approach. I don't in truth think that there are many, if any, online readers interested in this particular topic, to judge from the paucity of comments on the "1001 myths" posts.

Of course, few posts here get comments anyway, and in RE-ASSESSING I admitted that THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE has always been a critical theory blog first and anything else second. My main reason for "slowing down" the production of myth-comics as of this week is that the weekly posts keep me from pursuing some of my other critical projects. If the 1001 myths were incredibly popular with visiting readers, I would probably still have to scale back.

The project will probably go on as long as the blog does, but now I'll only do so once or twice a month, which will give me more time for other projects, which I don't expect to be any more popular but which will give me the chance to expatiate further on my never-ending Theory of Everything.

VERTIGO REVISIONS

I asked on the Captain Comics Forum whether or not there were any "big events' in the comics industry around the turn of the century, and one poster asserted that around that time Vertigo Comics revised certain contractual terms, resulting in many properties being published by Image and other publishers. I will update this item when I have more information, but here I wanted to preserve my thoughts on the subject.

_______

Right now I think that we're at a point when the comics medium is about as popular as it's going to get. While American comics will probably never again have the huge readership seen in the Golden Age, and probably won't even ever equal the medium's popularity in Asia, we're now at a point where collections of genre works-- which to me means BONE as much as BATMAN-- share bookstore shelf space with the arty stuff, even when that "shelf space" is a virtual one like on AMAZON.

I had not heard anything about what Mark said about Vertigo changing its licensing terms, and thus making it possible for Image to upgrade its, er, image. At a glance this would seem to make it possible for Image and other companies that aren't the Big Two to cross over into the profitable "young adult" market, since by all indications no one can beat the Big Two at superheroes.


So if this change took place in the late nineties, then yes, that would be an industry game-changer, and might indeed mark the conclusion of the Late Bronze Age, as Image and others managed to garner the bookstore acceptance that many eighties companies-- not least my old stomping-ground Fantagraphics-- sought for so long.


Does anyone have further info on the licensing revisions?


ADDENDUM 6-6-17: I could've sworn I posted this somewhere on the Archive, but here's my current breakdown of the Comic Book Ages, as I represented on the aforementioned forum:

GOLDEN AGE-- 1936 (or slightly earlier)-1955-- The form gets physically defined and is marketed mostly to kids even before the debut of SUPERMAN, though the Man of Steel is definitely the first property that puts comic books on the map in pop culture.

SILVER AGE(1955-1970)- the comics are hemmed in by the Code, though oddly this has the effect of forcing at least two companies, DC and Atlas-cum-Marvel, to get better.

EARLY BRONZE AGE (1970-1986)-- Though undergrounds and Warren magazines  paved the wall, 1970 marks the industry's first concerted efforts to appeal to older readers with CONAN, GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW, the return of horror comics, and, when newstand distribution withers away, attempts to woo the direct market with adult material

LATE BRONZE AGE (1986- 2000, maybe)-- DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, MAUS and WATCHMEN are the first graphic novels to really catch the attention of the mainstream press, which marks the first time comics have a chance to break out of the ghetto. There are some movements that may have seemed like steps backward, like Image in the 90s, but even Image Comics didn't stick to their own "bulky and banal" brand much beyond that decade. The nineties is also the era that manga TPBs made significant gains in bookstores, which gave bookstores in America-- and, I assume, other nations as well-- the financial base to start carrying more graphic novels. 

MODERN AGE, or IRON AGE (if you can avoid the negative connotations) might be from 2000 to now, except that I can't think of a particular publication or industry development that takes place in 2000 or shortly thereafter. There's one development outside the realm of comics, since 2000's X-MEN IMO initiates the first of the big-screen superhero films not based on Superman or Batman. (Whatever the successes of the Burton BATMANs, BLADE, and the Turtles, I would say X-MEN made superheroes seem like a dependable commodity.) But Hollywood's response to comics seems outside the boundaries of the comics industry, so I don't really want to use X-MEN as a transition-point-- even though it sorta is. 

And now I'll add that I've decided that the correct marker for the Iron Age is, indeed, the shift of DC Comics away from creator-owned properties, which has been enormously important for Image and many other companies insofar as giving those publishers "first look" at valuable properties-- almost as important as the shrinkage of the market that gave rise to the Silver Age.

A NOSTALGIA FOR SYNTAX

SYNTAX: --  the way in which linguistic elements (such as words) are put together to form constituents (such as phrases or clauses)-- Merriam Webster online.

After not having read THE HURTING for a couple years since I tried to engage blogger Tim O'Neil on the subject of Stan Lee, I happened across his newest post, TRUE BELIEVERS, part of a longer series of essays that I've not read. The substance of BELIEVERS is O'Neil's sussing out of his particular attachment to Marvel Comics and its characters. It's a refreshing piece in that, even though the author expresses more than a little disenchantment with current comics, he doesn't put forth some Grothian notion that comic books were a juvenile phase he should have grown out of, or that his life was hugely improved once he sold his soul to art-comics, or some such. For the most part, O'Neil attempts not to draw any morals:

Do you know why we care? I go back and forth – I’m not sure why I feel the way I do. There’s no conclusion here. Don’t look for a revelation, unless it’s your own. Certainty is comforting. It’s familiar. I don’t want to speak unless I know exactly what I’m about to say, and I don’t want to express an opinion unless that opinion is completely solid. It’s a lot harder to say, “I don’t know.”

I don’t know why comics hooked me. All I know is that they did. All I can do is try to tell you what I feel and think. Maybe you can provide your own answers.

I still found some grounds for disagreement, though, in the definition of one's attachment to a given mode of entertainment purely in terms of nostalgia, an attempt to re-connect with pleasurable aspects of one's upbringing:

There’s an old saying, credited to a man named Peter Graham, that the Golden Age of sci-fi is twelve. Knock a few years off and the same goes for comics: the comics you read as a kid will always be the best comics. Nothing will ever come close in your eyes to that first rush, from back before you knew enough about the making of the books to become cynical. Even if the comics you grew up with were awful (and they most likely were), they will always be the pure and uncut high for which you will hunger for the rest of your life.

This needs some modifications. First, I think it should be "the GOOD comics you read as a kid will always be the best comics." I can't speak for O'Neil, but my earliest memories of reading comics as a kid were informed by the sure and certain knowledge that some comics were memorable only because they were so bad. My memories are hazy of my earliest encounters with comic strips and kids' comic books, but I have a few recollections of displeasure. The earliest one I can conjure up had to do with my general disappointment that Gold Key's adaptation of the Warner Brothers cartoon characters not only failed to reproduce the hilarious anarchy of the animated shorts, but they also delivered far less entertainment than even middle-level funny-animals like WOODY WOODPECKER and TOM AND JERRY, much less the greatness of the Disney books.

Second, without endorsing Gary Groth's views on maturation, one does form different likes over the years. The child-reader who was grossed out by the DICK TRACY comic strip of the early 1960s became more tolerant of bloodshed by the 1970s, enough to appreciate at least mildly gory titles like Marvel's 1971 WEREWOLF BY NIGHT. So one's nostalgia isn't exactly the fixed point in time O'Neil describes. It's more of a continuum, formed by the fact that childhood becomes adolescence and one's priorities change, even if (arguably) one's basic tastes do not.

Third, I do have some problems with the idea that one only approaches entertainment in a spirit of weakness or disempowerment, though I don't rule those out entirely. O'Neil happily doesn't dwell on this too long:

I needed something. I needed something to hold onto when so much about the world didn’t make sense. I didn’t exclusively gravitate towards particular characters, although I obviously have my favorites just like everyone else. The characters themselves, I have always maintained, are relatively unimportant: what matters is the whole. What matters is that it hangs together into something resembling a cohesive aggregate entity, one story being told over decades by hundreds of people. 

But because his focus is exclusively personal, I think O'Neil misses seeing a pattern applicable to fans of all forms of entertainment: the reader's desire for coherence, to suss out many different views or takes on life and to decide what applies to said reader. One doesn't need the medium of an interconnected universe for this.

The word "syntax" is usually applied only to the way that words are used to form sentences, but it applies no less to the ways in which the ideas behind the words  cohere. This is something every person "needs" whether the world makes sense to them or not. People, whether they write stories or not, build up meaning through syntactical constructions, and an understanding of how this occurs becomes part of the Social Contract. I can't substantially disagree with Gary Groth if I don't understand how his conclusions proceed from his premises. So I think nostalgia for past pleasures, at least with respect to entertainment, stems from gaining a sense of empowerment as we master different levels of syntactical awareness.

In conclusion, O'Neil's essay again takes a shot or two at Stan Lee, but since I've already disagreed with his premises here, there's no need to repeat myself on this score. However, the reason I've continually referred to "modes of entertainment" is because I don't think anything O'Neil writes about comics applies only to comics:

Comics started off a shady business built to entice children into spending their money. They are still a shady business built to entice children into spending their money, but inflation and retail conditions meant their audience grew older without ever growing up. Just like me.

There may be individual artists who will starve in garrets for their individual visions, or will keep their works to themselves without any intent of publishing them. But none of these eccentrics ever created an art-form. Theater, literature, music and the visual arts become regularized activities when individuals in a society realize that they can specialize in singing or play-acting, and from this stems the role of "the professional," who must be paid for his or her services, so that he can continue delivering his art to society instead of stopping to plant corn or whatever. And none of these forms would gain traction if they did not offer the audience a way to see life through as many viewpoints as possible-- all of which adds up to a "syntax of experience."